Leica was a remarkable horse whose career took her from incorrigible youngster with a vicious buck to an impressive third-place finish at age twenty-four in the grueling MFHA Centennial Field Hunter Championship. She was still hunting and showing at age twenty-seven, when she had to be humanely euthanized as the result of a pasture injury.
With her bloodlines and dazzling good looks, Leica was primed to be an outstanding dressage horse. An imported bay with touches of white, she was registered Hanoverian (by Lindberg, out of St. Pr. Kari) who was also entered in the main stud book of the RPSI (Rheinland Pfalz Saar International) and Holsteiner registries.
But after abuse from trainers who pushed her too far too fast, Leica had other ideas, says owner Julie Whitlock McKee of Grantville, Georgia. McKee acquired the hard-headed mare at age four after the trainers gave up on her. The pair did not get off to an auspicious start, with Leica rearing the first time McKee threw a leg over her. Rearing and bucking would become a regular occurrence.
“For the first five years I owned her, she put me in the hospital once a year,” says McKee, whose litany of broken bones includes her hand, jaw and scapula. “She was tough, and she bucked me off all the time.”
McKee persevered, finding that hunting was the key to riding the feisty Leica. McKee was eventually able to show, hunt and event the mare.
Leica’s accomplishments are numerous, but she shone in the hunt field where she often served as a whip’s horse or led the field. She hunted with twenty hunts, including Shakerag, Midland, Bear Creek, Green Creek, Belle Meade, Live Oak, Tennessee Valley, Shamrock, Piedmont, Orange County, Rappahannock, Mooreland, Hardaway-Whitworth, Eglinton and Caledon, Toronto and North York, Millbrook, Loudoun Hunt West, South Creek, Four Winds, and Palm Beach, where huntsman Marc Dradge hunted the hounds off her. At age twenty-three, she participated in the Canadian Festival of Hunting.
In her later years, Leica carried dozens of beginning foxhunters, spoiling them forever with her knowledge of her job and her impeccable manners in the field.
At age twenty-four, Leica was the oldest horse in the MFHA Centennial Field Hunter Championship, up against sixty qualifiers—the best foxhunting horses from all over North America. She finished third after completing a hack class, a three-mile mock hunt at Morven Park and an individual jumping round that included opening a gate, dropping a pole, trotting a fence, and ponying a riderless horse.
However well Leica took care of other riders, McKee could never fully let down her guard with the mare. While out with the Midland Fox Hounds during her final hunt season, Leica saw an opportunity and took it, dumping McKee in front of Mason Lampton, MFH and the rest of the field.
“And the hounds weren’t even off the trailer,” says McKee.
Lampton and the field had a laugh at McKee’s expense, but McKee swears Leica was laughing harder.
July 27, 2010
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